Has anyone been able to get through to technical support this morning? My cable connection is currently down yet again and when I try to ring them I'm informed that the longest wait time is 31 minutes (not bad for TCL) but then get a message saying my call can't get put through because of overloading.

Well done Telstra, I guess you'll have less faults to repair if people can't inform you of them.

Hi Meesham. If you PM your account number and an indication of the problem i can have someone look into this. If you're in Ngaio, there is a issue that is being worked on, as noted on our website.

Everyone: Please note that we are receiving a high number of calls at the moment. All available staff are working to clear the backlog. Your call is important and we apologise for the delay. You may wish to email us using the website form at: https://telstraclear.custhelp.com/app/residential/ask/p/383

We will get back to you as soon as we can, and again apologise for the delay.

Thanks but my connection has come back in the past 20 minutes (I'm in Christchurch as well, Richmond area). 45 minutes is unfortunately about standard for most calls to their support line, the shortest wait I've had is 20 minutes.

I think it's a bit ironic that a Telco can run out of phone lines, if your technical support can get to the point where you can't accept any more calls I think you need to:

Increase your call capacity

Add more staff to your call centre

Fix your network

When my cable connection is working it's awesome but I'm having at least 1 outage a month at the moment, I'm becoming more and more reliant on my backup ADSL connection with Slingshot (who has a bad reputation, yet I've had no outages with them).

There is always going to be a long wait if an ISP has a widespread unexpected outage and everyone decides to ring in at once.

Not sure what you really want them to do about that, hire more CSR's? Well expect to pay higher amount per month to make that possible.

After checking the physical stuff ie: modem on, phone line has dial tone etc... I think checking Geekzone, GPForums and/or your ISP's Twitter account on mobile broadband is the way to go, pretty effective in finding out if there are any general/widespread outages.

meesham: Thanks but my connection has come back in the past 20 minutes (I'm in Christchurch as well, Richmond area). 45 minutes is unfortunately about standard for most calls to their support line, the shortest wait I've had is 20 minutes.

I think it's a bit ironic that a Telco can run out of phone lines, if your technical support can get to the point where you can't accept any more calls I think you need to:

Increase your call capacity

Add more staff to your call centre

Fix your network

When my cable connection is working it's awesome but I'm having at least 1 outage a month at the moment, I'm becoming more and more reliant on my backup ADSL connection with Slingshot (who has a bad reputation, yet I've had no outages with them).

Good idea to increase capacity, no one likes waiting but there is a big catch to this.

If a network falls over then naturally everyone will want to ring in about this and the contact centre gets swamped. When its working normally its possible things are quiet and getting through is easy hence your paying for a lot of staff sitting there doing nothing.

Best idea is to make sure there are easy to access notifications like a message playing on the line before you go on hold confirming there is a problem or using things like SMS where you can text in to have all the current issues sent to you.

Ragnor: There is always going to be a long wait if an ISP has a widespread unexpected outage and everyone decides to ring in at once.

Not sure what you really want them to do about that, hire more CSR's? Well expect to pay higher amount per month to make that possible.

After checking the physical stuff ie: modem on, phone line has dial tone etc... I think checking Geekzone, GPForums and/or your ISP's Twitter account on mobile broadband is the way to go, pretty effective in finding out if there are any general/widespread outages.

this annoys me , i dont have a mobile so if my internet goes down , phoning my isp is all that i can do , so to be able to get through is still important.

The thing is I'm not only talking about when there's big outages (the outage I had was earlier than the one in Wellington reported elsewhere on here). I've been having a lot of problems with our local node going offline and taking down our internet, this is pretty specific to our area yet there's still a wait of 30-40 minutes to speak to someone.

I would be interested to see their average call waiting times, actually. I have called a couple of times at very different times of the day (deliberately to try and avoid peak) and still waited quite some time before speaking to a human.

I just called now to report their broken proxy and got a "39 minute waiting" message. Instead of telling someone their proxy is broken I will just go play something while everyone else keeps banging their heads to the wall when they try to reach a site that is not working.